The Book of Frank

Praised by poet Anne Waldman as a “voyeuresque surreal portrait,” The Book of Frank is also, in the words of poet-critic Alan Gilbert, a “candid portrayal of human cruelty and its resultant fantasies of escape.” This is an expanded edition of CAConrad’s The Book of Frank, featuring additional “Frank” poems and an afterword by Eileen Myles.

Conrad’s approach is a welcome change from high-minded poetry that steadfastly ignores the body in all its dumb, limiting materiality. Rimbaud declared that “I is another”; Conrad’s work shows us that the body itself is the first source of alienation and estrangement from the self, and is thus the true subject of poetry. Only by engaging this body, by forcing ourselves to travel through the shames and humiliations of its portals, can we achieve transport.Christopher Schmidt, Bookforum

At once charming and frightening, The Book of Frank will certainly take the top of your head off, and it might just replace it with something better. Noah Eli Gordon, Boston Review

Conrad has created a intriguing book of poems, original, lucid and accessible in the best sense of the word. To read them is to enter into his world.Mary Wilson, MAKE Mag

In The Book of Frank, CAConrad recasts this birth; he makes a cast of this birth; he casts a new son from it; like Warhol, he generates counterfeits and multiples; like Warhol, these images start to resemble one another, to enjoy a paradoxical life in and as Art that totally replaces the horizon line of conventional biology, temporality and experience.Joyelle McSweeney, Jacket2

I…find that it takes risks. There are words in this book that speak to those who always find beauty within the filth. Just sit there…after reading, take a breath, and admire the beauty hidden within the words.Saku Egon Evon, Columbia Poetry Review

CAConrad’s childhood included selling cut flowers along the highway for their mother and helping her shoplift. They are the author of 9 books of poetry and essays, including The Book of Frank (Wave Books, 2010); A Beautiful Marsupial Afternoon (Wave Books, 2012); ECODEVIANCE (Wave Books, 2014), which won the 2014 Believer Poetry Award; and While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books, 2017), which won the 2018 Lamda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, as well as the co-editor of Supplication: Selected Poems of John Wieners. They are a Pew Fellow and have also received fellowships from Lannan Foundation, MacDowell Colony, Headlands Center for the Arts, Banff, RADAR, Flying Object, and Ucross. For their books, essays, and details on the documentary The Book of Conrad (Delinquent Films 2016), please visit www.CAConrad.blogspot.com.